(FL) Brother, 79, Protects Sister From Violent Intruder 01-20-05

> heraldtribune.com: Southwest Florida’s Information Leader
> Address:http://www.newscoast.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050119/NEWS/501190380/1270/NEWS0101
>
> January 20, 2005
> Brother, 79, protects sister from intruder
> By STEVE ECHEVERRIA JR.
> [email protected]
>
> SARASOTA — Trouble came crawling through Henrietta McCormick’s bedroom
> window Tuesday morning.
>
> After calling 911 to report a man breaking into her northeast Sarasota
> home, McCormick, 82, screamed for her 79-year-old brother, Julian Scott.
>
> Minutes later, George T. Jackson was in McCormick’s cramped living room
> nursing a head injury after Scott hit him with a handgun.
>
> Jackson, a 24-year-old resident with a lengthy criminal history, died
> hours later at Sarasota Memorial Hospital, Sarasota County Sheriff’s
> deputies reported.
>
> “I don’t feel good about it at all, and I’m sorry it had to happen, but
> I’m glad I was here to protect my sister,” said Scott, shaken from the
> episode.
>
> It was after 2 a.m. when McCormick told a dispatcher she heard a man
> pounding on the front door then checking the windows. Deputies headed
> out to McCormick’s single-story, cinder block duplex in the 2600 block
> of 24th Street.
>
> By then Jackson was climbing through McCormick’s bedroom window.
>
> “He had a rage in him something fierce,” she said.
>
> McCormick screamed for her brother in the next room. Groggy, he reached
> for his handgun and confronted Jackson, who lunged at him.
>
> The two men struggled for the gun. A shot fired into the ceiling,
> deputies reported.
>
> “The brother overpowered him and hit him on the top of the head with the
> butt of the gun,” said sheriff’s office spokesman Chuck Lesaltato.
>
> When deputies arrived, Jackson was conscious but incoherent. Deputies
> arrested Jackson on charges of residential burglary, possession of rock
> cocaine and possession of marijuana, and then took him to Sarasota
> Memorial Hospital at about 3 a.m., where he died at 7:36 a.m., deputies
> reported.
>
> “We don’t believe he died from the head injury,” Lesaltato said.
>
> The medical examiner’s office and detectives continue to investigate the
> case and Jackson’s cause of death, he added.
>
> Scott isn’t expected to be charged, Lesaltato said.
>
> Residents in the quiet neighborhood, where older houses are mixed in
> with newer homes with big fenced yards, were shocked.
>
> “This scares me,” said John Gilliam, whose grandmother lived in the
> neighborhood since the 1960s and knows McCormick. Jackson “must have
> been delirious.”
>
> McCormick considers herself lucky. Her brother moved in just a week ago.
>
> “I’d probably be in the funeral home if he hadn’t been here,” she said.
> “It’s something that came to us; we didn’t come to it.”
>